June 16, 201214 yr Never in a million year did I think I would fill up my Norco 4224, but the last 6 months i've had no space, and hard drive prices are still very high. Right now I have 53TB in there, and only 1TB free space (50GB per drive). I don't see myself recovering from this space issue within the next year. 4TB drives are still $300+, and upgrading 2TB drives to 3TB seems very expensive for little gains. I'm debating on mirroring my current server: Case: Norco 4224 with 120mm Bracket SAS Cards: 3x Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 CPU: Intel i3-2120 (3.3GHz) Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O Memory: 8GB Kingston (DDR3 1333) Power Supply: Corsair AX850 Fans: 3x Noctua NF-P12, 2x Noctua NF-R8 This would cost me about $1800 including another unRAID license. It would allow me to move my 12 hard drives that are storing movies onto the 2nd server, while keeping the 9 hard drives that are storing TV Shows on my 1st server. Then I could expand to around 120TB, at $160/3TB, when it currently cost me 160/1TB (~$80/1TB after selling old drive) with my currently full server. My current server can also only expand to 60TB before I need expensive 4TB drives, further making the $1800 investment a much better value over time. Main cons: 1) High initial cost, but better value over time than a single server. 2) Two servers to manage. I hear we will be able to daisy chain 2 unRAID servers together in the future though. 3) Twice the hardware, twice the possible issues. 4) Twice the power consumption. Thoughts? Is this the best solution for me?
June 16, 201214 yr 53 TB? I didn't think there were that many HD movies on the internet. I'd say drives.. you can probably sell some 2 TB drives on here for at least a partial recovery. whiteatom
June 16, 201214 yr Author 53 TB? I didn't think there were that many HD movies on the internet. I'd say drives.. you can probably sell some 2 TB drives on here for at least a partial recovery. whiteatom My movies are about 25-35GB a piece, TV show episodes 5-10GB, and that's after menus/extras are removed. I don't lower the quality because it seems like a waste to spend the money building a dedicated home theater with high end equipment just to watch 720p "HD" movies with low bitrates and lossy sound. True blu-ray quality is very noticeable over the few 5-7GB rips I have, I just can't justify lowering the quality of my collection because then i'd rather just put the disc in. I feel even if I upgraded my server to full 3TB (60TB), I would run out of space in the next 6 months again, and then it'd be the same situation with 4TB drives. With 2 servers, I can expand up to 120TB or so before needing to replace drives, and it will take me a few years to fill up another 50TB of data (and by then we'll have much larger drives). I believe it would be much cheaper then upgrading my current server to 60TB, 80TB, 100TB, then 120TB every time a new hard drive size comes out.
June 16, 201214 yr Upgrading drives, especially if they're still running well, is a pretty poor outlay. Let's look at approximate costs: Norco 4224: $350 Power Supply: $100 Mobo, CPU & RAM: $400 Total: $850 And that's for a pretty robust server. You could pare down the mobo and CPU cost pretty easily. Add in 24 2 TB drives @ $100 each: $2400. So that's $3250 for 48 TB, or $0.068 per GB If you get 24 3 TB drives for $150 each (a bargain at today's prices), you're looking at $3,600. That nets you 24 TB (really less). That's $0.15 per GB. That would also leave you with 24 2 TB drives that now need a new home. If you're able to sell them for $50 each, then you would get back $1200. So then you'd have a total cost of $2400 for 24 TB, which is $0.10 per GB. And a lot more bother to sell those drives. I think the math makes this an easy decision for someone in your situation.
June 16, 201214 yr Author Upgrading drives, especially if they're still running well, is a pretty poor outlay. Let's look at approximate costs: Norco 4224: $350 Power Supply: $100 Mobo, CPU & RAM: $400 Total: $850 And that's for a pretty robust server. You could pare down the mobo and CPU cost pretty easily. Add in 24 2 TB drives @ $100 each: $2400. So that's $3250 for 48 TB, or $0.068 per GB If you get 24 3 TB drives for $150 each (a bargain at today's prices), you're looking at $3,600. That nets you 24 TB (really less). That's $0.15 per GB. That would also leave you with 24 2 TB drives that now need a new home. If you're able to sell them for $50 each, then you would get back $1200. So then you'd have a total cost of $2400 for 24 TB, which is $0.10 per GB. And a lot more bother to sell those drives. I think the math makes this an easy decision for someone in your situation. Yup thats pretty much what I figured, just pulled the trigger on the second server. It was much more than what you estimated, but I'm also buying better fans, the 120mm bracket, SAS cables, 3 SAS cards, etc and it's still going to be much cheaper in the long run than upgrading this single server. If I did upgrade them all to 3TB drives, at much worse $/gig ratio, then i'd be out of space again in 6-12 months and have to do it again with 4TB drives. While if I had 2 servers going, i'd still have plenty of empty slots to add new drives too and by the time these servers are full, there will probably be 6+ TB drives to upgrade too.
June 16, 201214 yr Hardware RAID card, and start doubling up 2TB drives into RAID-0 4TB drives.... 3TB drives to 6TB RAID-0 drives.
June 16, 201214 yr Hardware RAID card, and start doubling up 2TB drives into RAID-0 4TB drives.... 3TB drives to 6TB RAID-0 drives. Interesting... and unRAID sees doubled-up RAID-0 drives as single drives? The question is does he have room left for more expansion boards?
June 17, 201214 yr Interesting... and unRAID sees doubled-up RAID-0 drives as single drives? Yup. And if you want to get fancy, and do RAID-5 underneath unRAID, you can survive any 3 individual drive failuresm Nd in many cases, more than that.
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